NYC mayor-elect gets advice from New Yorkers

New Yorkers are offering Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio their opinions on everything from schools and health care to making food more affordable as part of a two-week initiative to confront issues affecting the city.

The ideas “will help shape and inform the mayor’s agenda, it’ll deepen his vision and his thinking,” Jennifer Jones Austin, co-chair of de Blasio’s transition team, said on Sunday. “And so, we’re excited about receiving the data and putting it to good use.”

Jones Austin spoke while visiting the home base of the “Talking Transition” initiative sponsored by 10 philanthropic foundations — a 15,000-square-foot tent set up in Lower Manhattan that includes a message wall for residents to post sticky notes and computers to register their thoughts electronically.

“One of the great advantages of this is that it elicits the views of so many New Yorkers, it enables the new administration to get some more nuanced views of what citizens are thinking about,” said Carl Weisbrod, also a transition team co-chair.

Those responsible for creating Talking Transition include Christopher Stone, an American criminal justice expert who heads philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Jones Austin and Weisbrod represented de Blasio at the event Sunday, but his team is not involved in the project.

Taireina Gilbert, a member of Farm School NYC, which teaches people to plant their own produce to save money on food costs, wrote a sticky note that read: “Support for small community owned business!”

“If people can’t afford to make a way for themselves, then they stay stuck in their cycle of poverty,” Gilbert said. “And that affects the city as a whole.”

Other stickers read, “Subway stations should not look like horror films,” and “Continue to foster new development.”

The Manhattan tent is hosting discussion sessions on various issues that are being live-streamed online, while two mobile kiosks will travel through all five boroughs to collect residents’ comments. They can also submit their ideas online at talkingtransitionnyc.com.

Danny Fuchs, director of HR&A, a real estate, economic development and energy consulting firm, says Talking Transition aims to reach as broad a cross-section of New Yorkers as possible.

That includes immigrants living in the country illegally and residents of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, plus those who did not vote this year. Canvassers for the project speak 19 languages.